


Pull Back the Curtain (Be Ready for the Show)

by EmeraldHeiress



Series: Servio Sumus [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Confusion, Don't copy to another site, Double Speak, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Dub-con, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Jedi Indentured AU, Padme is not having a good time, Revelations, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 08:22:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26350045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmeraldHeiress/pseuds/EmeraldHeiress
Summary: She doesn't understand.Obi-Wan had greeted her so warmly — if cautiously — bare weeks ago. He and Anakin had even appeared to be trying to out-flirt each other. Seemingly eager to gain her attention.Now he treats her so coldly. Padmé just doesn't know what she's done to deserve his anger.
Relationships: Padmé Amidala & Obi-Wan Kenobi
Series: Servio Sumus [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1915666
Comments: 72
Kudos: 431
Collections: New SW Canon Server Works





	Pull Back the Curtain (Be Ready for the Show)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [A Different Kind of Service](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26314726) by [EmeraldHeiress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmeraldHeiress/pseuds/EmeraldHeiress). 



She doesn't understand.

Obi-Wan had greeted her so warmly — if cautiously — bare weeks ago. He and Anakin had even appeared to be trying to out-flirt each other. Seemingly eager to gain her attention.

But now… he is cold. Stiff. Unflinchingly polite but clear in his anger. A new distance yawns between them.

Padmé doesn't understand. What has she done to warrant such treatment? Such fury?

She knows that Obi-Wan is important to Anakin. Desperately important. And Anakin grows more important to _her_ every day so she must make peace between them. She must bridge the gap.

She invites him for tea.

If anything, the invitation appears to be a greater mistake. He is blank faced as he greets her, hiding behind icy protocol and impersonal small talk.

He calls her _Senator Amidala_ in a tone of voice she’s never heard before. It reminds her of the sands of Tatooine and a mudbrick house on the edge of Mos Eisley. Of the heat of the desert and the way the word master used to sit on Anakin’s tongue.

She misses being Padmé.

Tension sits on his shoulders and in the air between them. Filling the space with something she doesn’t understand.

Near the end of their scheduled time together, something snaps. Pulled taunt between them to the point of fracture and Obi-Wan’s mask finally slips. Padmé is relieved.

Politics she can handle. She’s waded in them since she was ten. She knows how to play the game. But this isn’t politics between them. She doesn’t know this battleground. She doesn’t know the rules. She only knows she’s losing and has nothing to help. Nothing to save her.

“What do you want, Senator?” Obi-Wan asks, suddenly weary. “Why have you asked me here?”

She blinks once. “I had hoped,” she begins delicately, “that we could talk about why you were so obviously angry with me.”

“I am not angry with you, Senator” Obi-Wan lies.

“You could at least lie better.” She murmurs.

Obi-Wan presses his lips together thinly.

“What would you have me do, Senator?” He asks softly. “Would you have me be happy? I thought you were different from the others. I thought that you were _better_.”

The room suddenly seems so much smaller to her. The venom in his voice, the malice, is overwhelming.

“I don’t understand.” She tells him, “What have I done to earn your ire?”

The scornful look in his eyes nearly scorches her with its power. Her breath catches in her throat. Whatever she has done… it’s serious. She wracks her mind to come up with a solution. An incident that might have led to this — Obi-Wan's opinion — she hadn't realized how much his good opinion means to her. To have lost it, and so thoroughly, _hurts_.

“You can’t tell me, your majesty, that you don’t know what you’ve done.” He pinches the bridge of his nose and the cup he was holding clatters on the saucer as it’s placed back on the table.

“At least,” he says, a little more gently, “you were kind. I do have to thank you for that.”

Obi-Wan looks up at her, grief in his eyes but jaw clenched with still present fury. He tips his head at her in mock deference, “Thank you for being kind when you took my padawan to bed, Senator. No one else has been as conscientious.”

Her heart beats a frantic tattoo in her ears. What?

“What?” She croaks. Anakin... no one else... _gentle_? Separately, the words make sense but strung together she can’t parse their meaning. She doesn’t understand but the words that Obi-Wan is saying, everything he is implying, makes her think she’s supposed to.

Makes her think that all of this is supposed to be common knowledge.

~~What is she missing? What does everyone else know? Who should have told her?~~

Icy fingers crawl up her spine and her stomach turns. _Something is very wrong_.

Obi-Wan chuckles but there is no humor in the laugh. It is a dark thing. Almost poisonous as it leaves his mouth.

“Surely you didn’t think you had been the only one.”

There is something low and unpleasant threaded through his voice now. Something _hateful_. Padmé wishes for the restrained fury from before. Even though it had been directed at her then. Even though this hate now was not.

“Anakin has been a favorite of the Chancellor for several years now.”

A unnamable emotion lances through her chest. Through her heart. If the Jedi doesn’t start speaking plainly… If he doesn’t tell her what’s going on _right now_ —

“Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Padmé breathes, trying to center herself. Trying to get some idea of what the kriff is going on right now. What the world actually is. “ _What are you talking about?_ ”

He stares at her, his blue eyes sharp and probing but something of her sincerity must shine through.

Slowly, the look on his face changes. The tension in the air bleeds away. Three words cross his lips. Incredulous.

“You don’t know.”

She shakes her head. Whatever the fuck he’s been on about, whatever he’s been accusing her of, _she doesn’t know_. ~~And she’s tired of not knowing. She needs to know. He needs to tell her and he needs to tell her _now_.~~

The Jedi wilts, fury gone. Something else fills the air around them. Something she can’t name. She throws it in with the rest of the things she already doesn’t understand of this day.

“Oh, Padmé.” She’s suddenly Padmé again and her heart rejoices. “You don’t know.”

And then he tells her.

He tells her about the Ruusan Reformation and the treaty. The service of the Jedi. The corruption of the senate. He tells her about the slow slide into systemic threats. The bartering for basic necessities.

He tells her about the ways the Jedi try and fail to protect their children. _Their children!_

But he doesn’t tell her everything because she is still a _Senator_. Something in her recoils. Padmé has never been so deeply ashamed of what she is. She became a senator to help her people and to help the Republic. She didn’t become one for… for _this!_

And then he tells her of Anakin.

Padmé spends ten minutes in the ‘fresher as her stomach rebels.

Obi-Wan has prepared another cup of tea for her when she returns, pale and trembling. Ginger and mint. She frowns. Immediately she wants to refuse, wants to recoil against any indication of service from a Jedi. The Order that she’s idolized since she was a child. Even more so after they — after this man in front of her and _Anakin_ — saved her planet.

“You didn’t have to do that.” She insists, nausea still turning in her stomach.

“I know.” His voice is firm. Something in her settles. Something small. He, at least, will set boundaries. Will tell her when she’s crossed a line.

Padmé sips the tea, grateful even as she hates it.

“Thank you.”

After a moment, she quietly reaffirms, both for both of them, “I didn’t know.”

“I know.” He answers, just as softly.

She would never — ever — have touched Anakin if she had. She would never have even considered— She closes her eyes at the thought. A once warm memory forever tainted. _Rotten_. She feels filthy. What she’s done is unforgivable.

“Padmé.” She looks up, eyes aching in the way they do moments before they begin to water. “Drink your tea.”

She swallows and nods, knowing it for the peace offering it was. He can’t forgive her, for it isn't his to give. And Anakin…

Her heart aches.

 _Anakin_.

What is she going to do about Anakin?

Obviously what she thought was growing between them wasn’t… Wasn’t what she believed. He must think she’s — she pushes the thought out of her mind. At this moment, it won’t do any good for her. For anyone. She can examine it later.

Pick it apart strand by strand and determine how awful a person she was.

For now, she has to accept.

Once she learns to do that, once she has drunk her tea and breathed a little more calm into the air, once her stomach settles… then she can go to war.

The senate, her battleground. Politics and diplomacy, her weapons.

She has been honing them — cutting her teeth around Naboo since she was a child.

And she cannot fail.


End file.
